this isn't working for me, the sprite i'm having turn is moving and the farther it gets from the center the more uncontrollable it is, and the rotations seem to be reversed, up and down at right, but left and right are flipped. the only difference is my diff is the target - transform.postion where target is a vector3 of the object i'm trying to chase

I like your solution for it's simplicity and in this way you don't have to use .Normalize. What I did to make this piece of code result in a sprite really pointing forward to the target was simply to increase the angle with 270f. So you get: